4 hours ago
11
I’m sure this isn’t the intended takeaway from The Boroughs, a supernatural murder-mystery set in a New Mexico retirement community, but I am transfixed by what is on offer to the ageing demographic across the pond. It’s like watching an episode of The White Lotus and vowing in your next life to come back as an affluent white American, but more realistic. God willing, we’ll all get old – and with a bit of careful planning, maybe we could stretch to a berth in one of the villages that a country with the space to house them provides for a reasonable sum?
Protagonist Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina) doesn’t know how lucky he is, any viewer native to these cramped isles might think, as his daughter and son-in-law drop him off at his new home in The Boroughs. There he will find like-aged neighbours, multiple shops, sports and exercise classes, a community centre and numerous other facilities, including a lavishly appointed care home (The Manor) for if and when the time comes. A skittering monster extracting a modicum of body fluids from you every now and again seems a small price to pay. But we’ll get to that.
The Boroughs takes its time to crank up the plot. It moves, you might say, at the pace of its inhabitants. Which is only to the good. It means there is time to build their world. Sam, whose wife Lily (Jane Kaczmarek) died suddenly and more or less in his arms five months ago, is mired in grief. It was Lily’s dream to retire here and Sam is furious with the owner of the village, Blaine Shaw (Seth Numrich), for not letting him break the contract. His neighbour Jack (Bill Pullman) is a cheery sort, not least because single men like him are a rare local commodity (though he has recently met “someone special”), whose bonhomie gradually improves Sam’s own mood. Wally “I have stage-four prostate cancer” Baker (Denis O’Hare) – most Boroughlingians open with their health status; it saves time – is one of the 100 residents recently banned from the community centre “after the orgy”, and rounding out what will soon become the Scooby gang are Geena Davis as Renee, a former band manager whose ex-husband is still giving her financial pain, and married couple Art (Clarke Peters), a weed-smoking hippy and Judy Daniels (Alfre Woodard), a retired journalist.
It is, obviously, a fine cast and any fears (deriving from the presence of the Duffer brothers, famed for Stranger Things, as producers) that some of the best actors in the business are about to be wasted on hokum are soon laid aside by an intelligent, witty script and a plot that nods to all the most entertaining monster tropes without being slavishly devoted to them. There’s also an unexpected tenderness and wisdom underlying the whole, that befits the stage of life its characters are at. Creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews are relative newcomers as writers (they have The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance TV series and Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim under their belts). They channel the spirit of Spielberg as the Duffers did, though they manage to emulate not just his unerring instinct for storytelling but his emphasis on emotional truth.
But hokum is fun too! And there is plenty of that as Sam begins to suspect that the distressed ramblings of Edward (Ed Begley Jr), the previous occupant of Sam’s house who is now confined to The Manor, about a creature in the walls of his home may have some truth in them. We get glimpses of a horrible thing (“It had too many legs”) creeping out of the oven at night and leaving shiny blue blood droplets when shot and injured, mysterious thefts of anything containing quartz round the village, mass bird deaths, underground shenanigans, a tree bearing glittering orange fruit and much, much more! Including a menacing security guy, old photographs that appear to show people from long ago looking exactly the same as they do now, and – could that be a veiled threat that Blaine, with a face as smooth as his manners, has just issued to Sam?
Like the best hokum, The Boroughs speaks, via monsters and electroplasm, to eternal human fears. Death is one, but The Boroughs parses it further – the fear of dying alone and friendless, after all one’s loved ones have gone, or after years of living in a terrifying, memory-less present – and then gives us comfort, that together most monsters can be defeated.
